ISSUE IN DOUBT (World War II, 1941-1942)

Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, June 3, 1942. Group of Marines on the “alert” between attacks. Smoke from burning fuel tanks in background had been set afire by a dive bomber the previous day.

National Archives

ISSUE IN DOUBT (World War II, 1941-1942)

The United States Marine Corps, in effect, fought two WWIIs.

The first as an outmanned, outgunned, sorely underequipped force whose audacious attacks and defenses could reasonably hope to do little more than sting the relentless onslaught of an overpowering foe.

The second as a juggernaut of tactics, courage, and technology against which the most heavily defended bastions in the Pacific could not stand.

Yet it was this second stage of the Pacific amphibious war that produced the most shocking casualties for the Corps. The Marines landed, again and again, into the teeth of massive defensive forces that had used long months to tunnel and fortify strategic islands of terrifying terrain. They faced every defensive weapon, structure, and stratagem that a seasoned, cunning enemy could devise.

No one would ever attempt to decide in which of these stages of a deadly war the Marines exhibited a more reckless and magnificent bravery.

The last weeks of 1941 would present a disheartening series of hopeless defenses for the Marine Corps. American islands far into the Western Pacific stood in the middle of a Japanese lake. There was no fragment of the United States Pacific Fleet ravaged at Pearl Harbor that could stand against a full-strength Imperial Navy flushed with victory. Island defenses were frail, only partially in place, and with hardly the faintest possibility of reinforcement.

Allied forces gave way at all points. Swept up in this tidal wave were the small detachments of United States Marines in China and Guam.

In China, the Legation Guard in Peking and Tientsin never had a chance.

In the port city of Chinwangtao, the rear echelon of the 4th Marines was within a day’s labor of completing its embarkation aboard a transport, when the Japanese seized the ship and the Marines.

Within hours of the Pearl Harbor raid, the Guam garrison, which included 153 Marines, came under air attack from Saipan-based Japanese aircraft. Their futile predicament reached a climax on December 10 when 5,500 Japanese soldiers made a successful predawn landing at Tumon Bay, southwest of the capital at Agana, while 400 Japanese naval infantry, the storied rikusentai, stormed ashore at Dungcas Beach to the north. Soon Guam’s governor, Navy Captain George McMillan, ordered the fruitless resistance to end.

After the courageous last stands at Wake Island, Bataan, Guam, and other U.S. possessions across the Pacific, there was little doubt what kind of war was going to be fought, and against whom, as this recruiting poster makes evident with its jungle background.

Library of Congress

Like the doomed defenders of the Alamo, looking for relief that never came and having no idea that their defense would have any long or resounding memory, the Marines of Wake Island dug in for the worst the enemy could throw.

The small sand spit, lightly garrisoned and remote from relief by the now-crippled U.S. Fleet, would provide the Empire with one more outpost in the north-central Pacific, a stepping-stone to Midway.

On December 11, the day after they steamrolled Guam, a Japanese invasion force approached Wake, expecting another easy conquest. But Wake Island would not die easily.

The Marines ambushed the Japanese invasion force with a scorching fire from their handful of 5-inch and 3-inch coast defense guns. [The 1st Defense Battalion’s fiery Major James] Devereux made his gunners wait until the ships had steamed into the “can’t miss” range.

Every round splattered Japanese steel and blood into the Pacific. The destroyer Hayate went down, the first Japanese surface craft to be sunk by Americans in this enormous Pacific War.

As the Japanese ships steamed away in disarray, Major [Paul] Putnam’s stitched-together Wildcats chased them with 100-pound bombs. Captain Henry Elrod planted one squarely on the fleeing destroyer Kisaragi, a beautiful shot, which exploded with great violence, sending the ship to the bottom.

American prisoners of war under guard by Japanese troops after the surrender of Bataan, April 1942.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Diosdado M.Yap

Now Wake became a matter of national pride on both sides. The Japanese, stung and embarrassed by this setback, doubled their air raids and dispatched a larger assault force for Wake.

From Pearl Harbor sailed a small American relief force. Spirits were high. But the naval high command was in disarray. The Pacific Fleet commander had been relieved of command in disgrace. The new designee, Admiral Chester Nimitz, was still en route, and the temporary commander was unwilling to risk his three remaining carriers at extreme range against unknown Japanese threats.

To the utter disgust of all hands, the American relief force turned back. The Wake garrison was doomed. But the Marines would go down fighting.

On December 21, the twelfth and last Grumman Wildcat crashed, and the survivors of Marine Fighter Squadron 211, less than a third of their original numbers, reported to Major Devereux as auxiliary infantrymen.

At 2:35 A.M. on December 23, the Japanese rikusentai poured out of their landing craft onto the island. U.S. Marines, sailors and civilians opened up a hot fire. The fighting ashore raged for hours. In one sector, the remaining aviators fought off several hundred Japanese until every pilot fell to overwhelming fire. Among the slain: Captain “Hank” Elrod, whose sustained bravery in the air and on the ground would make him the first Marine aviator to receive the Medal of Honor in this war.

Just before dawn, [Navy Commander Winfield Scott] Cunningham sent a taut message to Pearl: “Enemy on island; issue in doubt.” The Marines fought on desperately beyond hope. Unwilling to preside over the wholesale slaughter of his exhausted garrison – and now aware that the relief expedition had turned back – Cunningham ordered his men to surrender.

Forty-nine Marines, three sailors, and about seventy civilians died in the fight for Wake Island. The garrison inflicted about 1,100 casualties against the Japanese invaders. Marines had gotten their first chance to show what they could do, and it had been magnificent.

If the American defense of Wake Island illuminated the darkness on the home front like a bolt of lightning, the five-month battle to hold on to the Philippines was more like a lingering sunset – breathtakingly spectacular, full of hope, but doomed as well.

MacArthur would prove his brilliance in the years to come, but his defense of the Philippines reflected little of his later military forethought or decisiveness. His bomber force caught on the ground, MacArthur swiftly faced a confident, veteran invasion force advancing from five directions.

Having been defeated on all fronts, MacArthur declared Manila an “open city” and funneled his forces southward into the narrow, more-defensible Bataan Peninsula for a final stand.

In late January 1942, when 900 men of the Japanese 20th Infantry landed behind the American lines at Quinauan Point, the Marines at Mariveles joined the counterattacks.

Providing a brief lift to sagging morale, the GIs, Marines, and Filipinos actually thwarted the imperial landings, winning the so-called “Battle of the Points” and throwing the invaders back into the sea – something the Japanese were never able to do to the Marines.

On March 12, President Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia, there to undertake the rebuilding and reorganizing of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific.

On April 3, as Japanese forces launched a renewed offensive on Luzon, the weakened American-Filipino line crumbled.

Bataan fell six days later. There were 105 members of the 4th Marines among the 75,000 defenders who stumbled forward on the infamous Death March toward the POW camps.

Meanwhile, the Japanese quickly turned the full force of their field artillery and tactical aircraft against Corregidor. The small island now contained an interservice concentration of 11,000 Americans and Filipinos, survivors of the mainland fighting, all of them sickly, halfstarved, and grim-faced.

Colonel [Samuel L.] Howard’s 4th Marines, reinforced by stalwarts of every service, braced for the inevitable. For twenty-seven dreadful days, the garrison sustained a terrible pounding from Japanese gunners and aviators. The Marines dug in, scanning the bay for signs of the invasion force, almost welcoming the chance for one last grapple with the enemy. The emaciated survivors resembled walking skeletons.

The Japanese now called all the shots. On May 5 they commenced their most fierce bombardment of the campaign. Tiny Corregidor trembled and smoked. After dark, a Japanese battalion landed at North Point. A second battalion arrived before midnight.

The Marines greeted each landing party on the beach, and the battle raged all night at extremely close range.

By noon, the battle for Corregidor was over. Two Marines carried General Jonathan Wainwright’s flag of truce into the Japanese lines. The surviving Leathernecks smashed their rifles and machine guns against rocks.

In a painful midnight broadcast, Wainwright ordered his forces to lay down their arms. The heroic defense of the Philippine Islands passed into history. The war was five months old.

Imperial forces controlled the air and seas throughout an enormous arena ranging from the Kuriles to the Gilberts to the Solomons and on past Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean. They had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams of conquest. But now Japan’s top military and naval leaders succumbed to “Victory Disease,” believing themselves invincible in any distant theater.

Thus was born the ambitious plan to seize Midway and the Aleutians and threaten Hawaii.

Luckily for the Marines, Admiral Nimitz, rich in codebreaking intelligence, commanded the Pacific Fleet with a brilliant mixture of nerve and common sense, engineering a masterful carrier ambush. But it would be a near thing.

The small atoll suffered the brunt of the early action of the ensuing Battle of Midway (June 3-6, 1942), even though the crucial fighting took place between opposing carrier forces hundreds of miles to the northwest.

On the morning of June 4, the approaching Japanese carriers launched 108 planes to strike the atoll. Alerted by radar, the fighters of Marine Fighter Squadron 221 streaked aloft and met the raiders head-on.

It was a turkey shoot for the skilled, veteran Japanese Navy pilots flying against Marine fighters that ranged from obsolescent to antiquated. The Japanese formation continued, although now disorganized and behind schedule. Midway’s patient Marine antiaircraft gunners knocked several bombers spinning into the sea, but the island sustained a terrific pounding. Fires raged at all points. Yet through the smoke and flames came the steady throb of AA batteries seeking targets among the enemy formations.

Ground fire was so spirited, in fact, that a Japanese flight officer radioed, “There is need for a second attack wave.” The fateful decision to execute that strike would lead to the turning point of the battle.

While the Japanese were rearming and refueling their planes for this unplanned second attack, the carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance caught them flat-footed, sinking four fleet carriers and changing the balance of power in the Central Pacific.

On June 14, 1942, five weeks after the fall of the Philippines and barely a week after the Battle of Midway, the 1st Marine Division arrived in New Zealand from its stateside training bases. Major General Alexander Vandegrift, a veteran of combat at long-ago Veracruz, held command.

The division was not, in Vandegrift’s considered opinion, fully trained or equipped for offensive combat (in fact, the 7th Marines had been detached for defense of Samoa), but he hoped that six more months of intensive field training in New Zealand would provide the necessary boost.

But just eleven days after arriving in New Zealand, Vandegrift got the shock of his life. An emergency in the Solomons would require his understrength division to execute an amphibious assault within the next six weeks, ready or not.

His objective was a strange-sounding place he had never heard of – Guadalcanal.